A fake association with a reputable company can enhance the credibility and effectiveness of a malicious social engineering campaign, such as phishing, typosquatting, brandjacking, professional recruiting fraud, and financial fraud. An online social network may be a fruitful environment for such fraud. Self-reporting of user identity and affiliations further enable fraud.
Third party whitelists and blacklists may help to some extent. However, automatic detection of a user who is involved with a malicious campaign is a topic of ongoing research.